Amazon Glacier

Long-term, secure, durable object storage for data archiving

Amazon Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup. It is designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability, and provides comprehensive security and compliance capabilities that can help meet even the most stringent regulatory requirements. Amazon Glacier provides query-in-place functionality, allowing you to run powerful analytics directly on your archive data at rest. Customers can store data for as little as $0.004 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions. To keep costs low yet suitable for varying retrieval needs, Amazon Glacier provides three options for access to archives, from a few minutes to several hours.

Deep Dive on Amazon Glacier

Benefits

RETRIEVALS AS QUICK AS 1-5 MINUTES

Amazon Glacier provides three retrieval options to fit your use case. Expedited retrievals typically return data in 1-5 minutes, and are great for Active Archive use cases. Standard retrievals typically complete between 3-5 hours work, and work well for less time-sensitive needs like backup data, media editing, or long-term analytics. Bulk retrievals are the lowest-cost retrieval option, returning large amounts of data within 5-12 hours.

UNMATCHED DURABILITY & SCALABILITY

Amazon Glacier runs on the world’s largest global cloud infrastructure, and was designed for 99.999999999% of durability. Data is automatically distributed across a minimum of three physical Availability Zones that are geographically separated within an AWS Region, and Amazon Glacier can also automatically replicate data to any other AWS Region.

LOW COST

Amazon Glacier is designed to be the lowest cost AWS object storage class, allowing you to archive large amounts of data at a very low cost. This makes it feasible to retain all the data you want for use cases like data lakes, analytics, IoT, machine learning, compliance, and media asset archiving. You pay only for what you need, with no minimum commitments or up-front fees.

MOST SUPPORTED PLATFORM WITH THE LARGEST ECOSYSTEM

In addition to integration with most AWS services, the Amazon object storage ecosystem includes tens of thousands of consulting, systems integrator and independent software vendor partners, with more joining every month. And the AWS Marketplace offers 35 categories and more than 3,500 software listings from over 1,100 ISVs that are pre-configured to deploy on the AWS Cloud. AWS Partner Network partners have adapted their services and software to work with Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier for solutions like Backup & Recovery, Archiving, and Disaster Recovery. No other cloud provider has more partners with solutions that are pre-integrated to work with their service.

QUERY IN PLACE

Amazon Glacier is the only cloud archive storage service that allows you to query data in place and retrieve only the subset of data you need from within an archive. Amazon Glacier Select helps you reduce the total cost of ownership by extending your data lake into cost-effective archive storage.

Use cases

MEDIA ASSET WORKFLOWS

Media assets such as video and news footage require durable storage and can grow to many petabytes over time. Amazon Glacier allows you to archive older media content affordably then move it to Amazon S3 for distribution when needed.

REGULATORY AND COMPLIANCE ARCHIVING

Many enterprises like Financial Services and Healthcare must retain regulatory and compliance archives for extended durations. Amazon Glacier Vault Lock helps you set compliance controls to meet your compliance objectives, such as SEC Rule 17a-4(f).

SCIENTIFIC DATA STORAGE

Research organizations generate, analyze, and archive vast amounts of data. With Amazon Glacier, you avoid the complexities of hardware and facility management and capacity planning.

DIGITAL PRESERVATION

Libraries and government agencies face data-integrity challenges in their digital preservation efforts. Unlike traditional systems, which can require laborious data verification and manual repair, Amazon Glacier performs regular, systematic data integrity checks and is built to be automatically self-healing.

MAGNETIC TAPE REPLACEMENT

On-premises or offsite tape libraries can lower storage costs but require large upfront investments and specialized maintenance. Amazon Glacier has no upfront cost and eliminates the cost and burden of maintenance.